Europeans experienced the foreign Orient through pictorial order

Evidence

‘So here we are in Egypt’, wrote Gustave Flaubert, in a letter from Cairo in January 1850. ‘What can I say about it all? What can I write you? As yet I am scarcely over the initial bedazzlement … each detail reaches out to grip you; it pinches you; and the more you concentrate on it the less you grasp the whole. Then gradually all this becomes harmonious and the pieces fall into place of themselves, in accordance with the laws of perspective. But the first days, by God, it is such a bewildering chaos of colours …’ Flaubert experiences Cairo as a visual turmoil. At first it is indescribable, except as disorder. What can he write about the place? That it is a chaos of colour and detail, which refuses to compose itself as a picture. The disorienting experience of a Cairo street, in other words, with its arguments in unknown languages, strangers who brush past in strange clothes, unusual colours, and unfamiliar sounds and smells, is expressed as an absence of pictorial order. There is no distance, this means, between oneself and the view, and the eyes are reduced to organs of touch: ‘each detail reaches out to grip you’. Without a separation of the self from a picture, moreover, it becomes impossible to grasp ‘the whole’. The experience of the world as a picture set up before the subject is linked, as we will see, to the unusual conception of the world as a limited totality, something that forms a bounded structure or system. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 104 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This notion of an ‘imaginary structure’ that exists before and apart from something called ‘external reality’, in the same way as an exhibit or a plan stands apart from the real world it represents, is what gives shape to the experience and understanding of objective people. It governs, in other words, the strange anthropology in which we inhabitants of the world-as-exhibition believe. In order to anthropologise a little further our thinking about the person and the world, I am now going to move on to consider what happened to the nineteenth-century European who travelled to the Middle East. The Orient, after all, was the great ‘external reality’ of modern Europe – the most common object of its exhibitions, the great signified. By the late 1860s Thomas Cook, who had launched the modern tourist industry by organising excursion trains with the Midland Railway Company to visit the Crystal Palace exhibition, was offering excursions to visit not exhibits of the Orient but the real thing. Yet as we will see, European visitors would arrive in the Orient looking for the same kind of structure ‘raised in the imagination’. They would come expecting to find a world where a structure or meaning exists somehow apart, as in an exhibition, from the ‘reality’ of things-in-themselves. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 103 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

On the other hand, however, while setting themselves apart in this way from a world-as-picture, Europeans also wanted to experience it as though it were the real thing. Like the visitor to an exhibition, travellers wanted to immerse themselves in the Orient and ‘touch with their fingers a strange civilisation’. Edward Lane wrote in his journal of wanting ‘to throw myself entirely among strangers, … to adopt their language, their customs, and their dress’. This kind of immersion was to make possible the profusion of ethnographic detail in writers such as Lane, and produce in their work the effect of a direct and immediate experience of the Orient. In Lane, and even more so in writers like Flaubert and Nerval, the desire for this immediacy of the real became a desire for direct and physical contact with the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 112 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Europeans could only encounter the Orient through the exhibition frame; European curiosity was framed as natural, masking its own historical construction; Every European public venue rendered the world to visitors as a pictured object (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Europeans experienced foreign places by reducing the world to pictorial order #corroborates (0.95) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 104
• European tourists approached the real Orient searching for exhibition-like structure #exemplifies (0.92) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 103
• European Orientalist travellers pursued both detached representation and immersive experience of the Orient #complicates (0.82) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 112
• European knowledge of the Orient shifted from textual contemplation to administrative and military appropriation #complicates (0.72) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 522